


An unseasonable chill

by nakanowardcat



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Jack frost au, M/M, implied non-fatal drowning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-11-01 20:37:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17874440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nakanowardcat/pseuds/nakanowardcat
Summary: Victor is a sweet boy, who just happens to be looking at life happening above him from the bottom of a frozen lake.(Literally, not in a metaphorical sense of being alone. He is literally in the lake.)A Jack Frost inspired AU.





	An unseasonable chill

**Author's Note:**

> I cannot figure out where this should go, but I feel compelled to post it in the hopes a reader might figure out what should happen.  
> If you enjoy it and would like to read more, please let me know.

 

 

Victor was born in winter, and so didn't particularly mind carrying winter with him. It had been this way for such a long time he'd forgotten how it was before frost appeared beneath his every footstep. What he did remember was vague and watery.

 

He remembered the lake, circled by snow-coated pines. Looking down, he saw in a disconnected way his own body, wrapped in sturdy brown layers of clothes, his leg coming up. And then far away, his foot at the other end of it. He wore battered black boots, sizes too small for his growing feet. He was skating on the frozen lake. Wintry flakes danced around him.

 

Struggle and scrunch his eyes shut as he might, Victor remembered nothing before this. Only that after, looking down, his foot formed a crack. Quicker than his eyes, the ice fractured, breaking apart and letting his body slip through as it disappeared beneath him into the freezing water.

 

Pain shot through every inch of skin, screaming at the shock, Victor in agony, fighting the numbing cold. Kick as he might, like heavy mud he only sunk lower. He seemed to weigh more than the water. Most humans popped up like an iceberg. Victor floated as gracefully as a large rock, which is to say not at all.

 

When he returned to think about it, another possibility he'd not managed to erase from his mind was that the lake simply did not want him to leave.

 

His feet hit the bottom. He came down, lying against the silt, looking up at the hexagon bright hole he'd come through. A woman above the ice was screaming. The voice carried oddly through the water.

 

Perhaps she was singing.

 

After two minutes of struggle the very last of his breath ran out. Victor was still glued to the lake floor. The cold shocked his skin and began seeping into his arms and legs, winding and working upwards. His eyelids wouldn't shut. Frost grew over his lashes. His hair floated above him, the wet strands like sheets of seaweed.

 

Somehow, when he'd gotten down there and was looking up, it didn't seem so bad. Even the lack of air didn't seem to be a problem. Victor tried to make his chest fill but water blocked up his nose so he stopped. Nevertheless, he didn't seem to be experiencing any problem. His head felt clear, surprisingly more so than it had before. It must have been the cold.

 

He decided to wait and see how long this state of affairs could go on for. He felt like he was observing a pot filling with water. The tap ran, his focus drifting around as his eyes took in the blurry shape of the filling pot. And all the while staring at it, when his attention snapped back, the pot was overflowing.

 

In the same way, he noticed one day that the tips of his seaweed-like waving hair had gone silver. He wondered if it was a trick of the starlight (it was night then). But come dawn he confirmed that the ends of his hair were the same colour as the ice above him.

 

He still found he couldn't move, but the not moving didn't bother him too much. He felt like marimo, drifting about with the movement of the tide.

 

A lot of time must have passed. Or maybe none at all. Victor could barely bring his focus onto the subject. When he did he thought he ought to count the dawns and nights that had taken place up above the ice, but when he tried he always forgot to remember where he'd started counting from and the whole exercise fell apart in an instant.

 

What he thought of was nothing. The feel of the cold pressing on his skin seemed normal now. It had seeped down into his bones, up his spine, over the back of his neck and climbing into his pores. It was working down his hair, silver to the middle now.

 

Dawn, night; didn't make much difference to the underlake, Victor thought. The ice above remained white, shining. Like a torch through opal.

 

His boots were too small. The cramp was older than the cold cramp and his toes were crushed. He couldn't remember why they were small. He'd been poor, but what was poor? The daylight was creeping over the lake now, illuminating one side of the green depth without walls. It must be another night had passed.

 

He lay at the bottom of the lake. The silver touched his scalp. The cold sealed up his skin.

 

Victor could have stayed there forever, in the calm freezing lake. He didn't have a plan really. He thought sometimes of the surface, of the sound of the crying woman. But it had been so long since she'd cried, perhaps she was walking home even now, sniffling and red. Perhaps she was by the pot and the fire, letting it overflow.

 

Perhaps she was old.

 

Perhaps she was dead.

 

The ice above him grew dancing shadows. Scraping sounds reached him and laughter, strange and remote but the laughter of children. Victor strained to follow the shadows that must have been their bodies above the ice. Sometimes a boom resonated and the shadow fell flat, like a starfish above. Then Victor felt like he was a shadow cast by the starfish. He was the reflection. There wasn't enough sunlight for that to be true of course. But he still felt the sunlight he imagined warm up his frozen skin. The thought made him smile, like he was part of the game of tag going on above.

 

Then the shadows left and his attention drifted again.

 

One evening, he heard scraping above.

 

He had been dreaming, maybe, and the sound caught his attention. That day one or two people had come to the lake. They'd stuck close to the edges. It seemed to Victor like a while since he'd last seen anyone. Months? Years? He wasn't sure. But from the frosted white of the ice, dimmer than it should be, he knew it was late for a skater to be out and that the ice was weaker than it should be.

 

His brain caught up with what his eyes saw.

 

The ice was thin.

 

Victor focused with a narrowness he hadn't ever used on the greyish shadow moving smoothly along the right bank. It passed closer to the middle, to the brighter spot where Victor must have fallen through.

 

Bright and obvious like the moon in the night sky to Victor from down here. Invisible up there.

 

Victor worried, horribly anxious. If it was one of the girls and boys who played there, they'd be all alone. He didn't want someone small to fall into the lake and sink down to the bottom. He couldn't remember if it was the same for him, but they had mothers and fathers and people who worried about them. Worried terribly like Victor, who saw the little grey shape make circles closer and closer, closer...

 

The ice cracked with the sound of a shotgun. A pair of tiny legs, followed immediately by a body in a light blue coat, and then a screaming girl with bright red hair. She flailed and beat her fists, kicking up. The movement made her slip along the ice, away from the gap. The screams bubbled up around her and were trapped by the ice.

 

Then, horrified, Victor saw her begin to sink as he had. Her short red hair streamed about her terrified blood-red face.

 

Victor sat in horrified stillness. He was a starfish at the bottom of the lake and here sh would fall down, on top of him, into the stillness and the cold. Salt mixed into the pure water from his eyes: how cruel, how cold, he could not bear to watch silver climb along her head.

 

The red girl screamed till the bubbles ran out. Water weighed down her frantic arms, filled the crevices of her clothes with a rock-like drag. Her beautiful blue eyes met Victor's.

 

Pure horror overcame them. The face contorted.

 

Victor would have loved to swim and carry her back up. His watery cage, the water wrapping down into the very stillness of his own mind, prevented him. So down the little girl came.

 

A movement on the ice. A shout. A woman's figure running over and then catching themselves, rushing out onto the ice as carefully as they could while desperate.

 

Two hands plunged in and grabbed the girl round her waist.

 

Her hair trailed bright red streaks as she was pulled from the abyss.

 

The figure grabbed her hands and pulled her along the ice to the safety of the thicker shelf along the edge, then collapsed on her, weeping. Her hands worked fast to strip off the soaked layers and she rolled the girl into her own dry coat.

 

Victor pictured the blood rush back into the girl's face till it flamed the same colour as her hair and finally, after shuddering into the warmth of the figure's coat and body, screeching sobs ripped out of her throat.

 

The woman cradled her close, kissed her sopping head desperately. Victor heard their whimpers as a faint sound, the sound of a tragedy from miles above.

 

Victor watched all of this.

 

After that a hush fell over the lake.

 

Water made

 

The frosts retreated from the end of Victor’s nose. He’d been waiting for summer for a while, knowing the ice shrank back to the edges of the pool, and the view over head changed from the dreary greys and the long cold black of night into jadey blues. The imperceptible warmth from the sun seeped into the water, melting away the frost from his eyelids, from binding his arms in the depths.

Summer in the pond was release, and nature abounded. Summer brought the feet of children to stir up mud from the banks, to plough the water over head, bubbling white dots around their small bodies. Like a forest about him, algae leapt up from the pond floor towards the light.

Victor sighed in bliss as the warmth seeped into his bones, his shoulders loose enough to roll and relax. Fish darted overhead. He pictured the green of the land he remembered. The grass whispering in the breeze. A lazy honeybee fat with pollen resting on the flower’s lips. Somehow he could transform them into the waving green of the pond’s tide, the silver flash of gauzy fins. The same, and yet different. He missed the feeling of air over him, lighter than the breeze, lightest to water’s unfeeling weight. Victor felt the ache of it settle over him as surely as the summer sun extended days into the Russian white nights.

The last frosty flakes melted off his eyelashes. An odd fish gazed placidly at him, thinking itself hidden in the strands of Victor’s hair.

Victor gazed back, amused at the event. The fish with its one visible, unblinking blue eye. A thought occurred to Victor and he let it float through him, as fluid as the water. It wasn’t a big thought, but it was interesting to him. The fish kept up its observation.

Down here, he was staring up from where he’d fallen, who knew how long ago, in through the ice and down. Upwards towards the light and life that could occasionally be guessed at above.

The fish was assured by the stillness. He began looping through the silvery veil, searching for a smaller meal.

He stayed focused on it. There was nothing to see above anymore. The water was timeless as ever, unknowing, flowing and flown back and forth between two banks.

The fish darted out of view. A tiny dash of current pushed Victor’s eyelash.

He blinked.

Only a blink, and at once the whole stillness felt unreal.

He could _move_.

His pulse raced.

His fingers twitched, his head shook, his hair spread out and suddenly in three two one kicks Victor was off the muddy floor, racing towards the light.

 

 


End file.
